doctor

Before I start in on today's entry, I have a little snippet of story for you to read:

I walked down the hospital corridor away from my room. One of the doctors I didn't know well--Dr. Karlson, I think--called out, "Jason, wait!"

I turned around, glaring.

The doctor took out a stethoscope. "Before you leave, I have to check your heart one more time."

I sighed. "Can't I just get out of here?"

"No, Jason. I'm sorry, but there are certain rules we have to follow."

Now: what gender is Dr. Karlson?

It should be obvious that the doctor's gender is unspecified in this little snippet. But something weird often happens when I read the word "doctor":

Not only do I assume that the doctor is male (which a lot of people, at least in the US, do), but I often think that the doctor was explicitly identified as male.

And then a paragraph or a page later, the author drops a pronoun and we discover that the doctor is female. And I say to myself, wait, the author explicitly said the doctor was male, this is not just me being sexist, it was right there in the story. And then I go back and look, and in fact it wasn't right there in the story; it was just me being sexist. Or gender-normative or something.

It's not that I don't believe in female doctors. I probably know more female medical doctors than male medical doctors; I've certainly gone to as many female doctors as male ones; it doesn't bother or upset or surprise me to encounter a woman who's a doctor. And if a story I'm reading clearly identifies a doctor as female upfront, that seems perfectly normal.

It's just that when I see the word "doctor" without any other markers, somehow my brain develops the idea that I've been explicitly told that the doctor is male. It's kind of bewildering, and remarkably (and unfortunately) consistent.

There are other professions that I have a strong gender assumptions for, of course. But I don't generally go so far in fabricating evidence about those.

Delany once referred to the assumptions we make about generic and otherwise undescribed people as the "unmarked state": in the absence of any markers giving us information to the contrary, we tend to assume certain things about people when they're mentioned to us. The unmarked state for a story's narrator (for a lot of us white American readers) tends to be white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, etc. Probably male, too, although sometimes the unmarked gender for the narrator is the same as the gender of the author, or the assumed gender of the author if you can't tell from the author's name.

For me, the unmarked "nurse" is female; the unmarked "guard" is male. Certainly the unmarked "programmer" or "software engineer" or "computer scientist" is male. And there are plenty of others.

But I don't think my assumption is ever quite so strong with other words as with the word "doctor."

4 Responses to “doctor”

  1. Vardibidian

    I was just reading a mystery/thriller novel that had a bit in the prologue from the point of view of the Mad Bomber. Just a few pages, but enough for it to be really obvious to me that the sex of the Mad Bomber was unmarked, and that we were supposed to assume that the Mad Bomber was male but that we would discover in the end that the Mad Bomber was a woman in a shocking plot twist.

    It kinda ruined the book for me. And I spotted it, in part, because I’ve read that sort of thing several times, enough that if, in a particular sort of book, the villain is unmarked, I assume the villain is female because the unmarked state is male. Which is an odd twist to the whole thing.

    Thanks,
    -V.

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  2. Kairon_Gnothi

    Bh and Wolf were watching Medium, which always begins with a vision, usually of the crime for that episode. A woman in her 40s-50s is driving down the street and as the car turns into the garage, the viewer can see “Judge” on the license plate. Gunfire perforates the driver’s side window.

    Only a little later is it revealed that the judge’s wife was killed. Bh and Wolf both _assumed_ that the driver was the judge.

    I wonder if the reason so many Romance languages do add gender to otherwise gender-neutral objects is that people may have a hardwired (nature) tendency to label things with gender; only the softwiring (nuture)of socialization determines the pink or blue color of the label.

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  3. Jed

    V: Interesting point re careful lack of markings indicating indirection and therefore markedness.

    K_G: Interesting; even though the unmarked state for “judge” is male for me, I think in the scene you describe I would’ve assumed the woman was the judge, just ’cause when I’m presented with a person and a label that isn’t clearly contradictory, I’m inclined to put them together.

    Re gender markers in language: I still have yet to get a clear answer on this from a native speaker, but my impression is that grammatical gender has little to do with psychological perception of maleness/femaleness. For example, although “la chaise” is grammatically gendered female, my impression is that most French people don’t normally think of chairs as inherently feminine.

    Also, there are plenty of languages that don’t have grammatical gender; I’d think that if it were hardwired into people, and if that were the reason for Romance languages having grammatical gender, then all other languages would have it as well.

    Finally, although I might be willing to accept the idea that most people are hardwired to assign gender to people, and maybe even to animals, I have a hard time buying the notion that people are hardwired to assign gender to inanimate things. For most inanimate objects, it would never occur to me to assign a gender to them.

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  4. Michael

    I’ve known more male doctors than female doctors, both personally and as a patient, so I would have expected that my gender defaults would kick in the same way as yours. But in that story excerpt, I assumed the doctor was female. I believe it was entirely because of the last line: “No, Jason. I’m sorry, but there are certain rules we have to follow.” There are several cues there that the expected power relationship between a male doctor and a male patient has been disrupted, and since I assume a Jason is male, the easiest explanation is that the doctor is female. (There are other possible reasons — a closer relationship than typical between the doctor and patient, a patient who has a lot of money or power, etc. — but none of those are hinted at.)

    The use of the first name when it’s not being used to get attention is more common in women’s speech. The use of “I’m sorry” as a hedge is again more common in women’s speech or when the power dynamic favors the listener. The use of “we” rather than “I” in following the rules, and the appeal to the rules themselves as authority that both parties should recognize, also seem odd for a male-male dialogue.

    I’d be curious whether readers would tend to make different assumptions about the doctor’s gender if the final sentence were “No, not until I clear you.”

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